By the time Scarlett and Jack have arrived – both hideously glamorous in the manner of people from drinks’ adverts on the telly: Scarlett with platinum hair in an updo and with red lipstick on her full lips, and Jack looking like he’s up for a role in a Nespresso advert – Granny Bridget is installed in a comfy chair in the kitchen room where she admires the wallpaper and promises to French plait Lexi’s hair.
‘I had hair as long as yours once, and it was the same colour as your mother’s,’ she says happily, as Lexi sits with her and rifles through Granny’s bag of knitting and ribbons to find something she approves of for said plaiting.
Eddie has already stomped upstairs and can be heard roaring about damp in the bedrooms.
‘There’s not damp, is there?’ says Granny, anxious.
A trickle of tears appear on her cheeks.
Granny can’t get anxious without a flood of tears. Or happy. Or even mildly entertained, for that matter. She says she cried at her own wedding, at my mother’s birth and at every family wedding since. She is a danger at funerals and at bingo once, when she won the jackpot, she cried so much that anoff-duty nurse raced over in case an ambulance was needed.
She’s a highly sensitive person, Mum told us all years ago. ‘It’s an automatic reaction for her: nothing strange, nothing connected with any medical issue like Parkinsons or MS.’
‘No damp,’ I reassure her now, as my mother hands over a pack of tissues. ‘We had a surveyor.’
‘Really?’ says Granny, mopping up and taking a shaky breath.
‘Eddie likes a bit of chaos,’ Mum reminds her mother, patting her hand where the skin is dotted with liver spots.
‘He does,’ agrees Granny, and blots away the last of the tears. ‘He locked Delilah in the utility room this morning and I thought she was lost!’
‘But she wasn’t,’ says my mother quickly.
Granny pauses. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’m going to hide his teeth when he’s asleep one night. See how he likes that.’ Her tiny little face lights up with an impish grin.
We all laugh.
Once her hair is plaited, Lexi decides she’ll go upstairs to oversee Granddad Eddie’s house viewing.
That leaves the three Abalone sisters, our mother, and Granny Bridget in the kitchen because Jack has gone off to talk to the men.
Scarlett and I have hauled one of my big pantry boxes onto the table. Mum wants to help unpack it, but I say no.
‘Sit down and I’ll make tea. You’re having a little rest.’
The showing Granddad the house tour is going hilariously badly. I know this because I can hear the roars.
‘What do you want with a house this size?’ Granddad is shouting at the top of his voice, which is his only volume. ‘Landed gentry are we now? I never thought I’d see the day. Far from big houses you were reared ...’
We all grin at each other, apart from Granny Bridget, who is so used to the sound of Eddie’s shouting and talking about how strange people are these days that I swear she can block his voice out completely.
‘I like what you’ve done with this room,’ she says in her soft dreamy way.
The rest of us say nothing for a moment and then I say. ‘Thank you, Granny.’
We have done precisely nothing with the kitchen apart from put in the big stove, but it is lovely, with its simple cream wooden cabinets, large kitchen window overlooking what was once a herb garden, I think, and gleaming stainless steel splashbacks.
Up to now, my TV show has been filmed in a grim industrial estate in the west of the city in a fake kitchen, so the producers are thrilled they’ll be able to use my home.
I wait for Mildred to tell me themodern-obsessed producers will hate the sight of the pretty herb garden visible out the window – the only sliver of weeded ground in the whole place – but for once, she shuts her mouth. My mother adores me so much that I think my unconscious cannotself-sabotage when she is around.
‘You’ve got flowering jasmine tea,’ says Scarlett in delight, pulling a tin out of the big pantry box. ‘I love this stuff.’
Granny Bridget looks up, interested.
‘When you add the boiling water, the blossom opens and it’s just beautiful.’
Mum and I smile at each other. It’s lovely to see Scarlett animated like this. I’m not sure if she’s really trying her best to be happy about the new house, because I know she’s so broken after the last heartbreaking round of IVF treatment. Two embryos were all they were left with after harvesting. The fertility team implanted those and she didn’t even have to wait till the sixteen days were up to know she wasn’t pregnant. The early bleed told her.
